five things i hold true
by ClassicLassitudeCacoethes
Summary: Five things I hold true. Five things that keep me running. Five things that keep me fighting. Five things. One person.


Disclaimer: I don't own the characters. I wish. I really wish. But I don't.

PAIRING: USUK

WARNING: None. But I hope I succeed at tugging on at least one heartstring, maybe a heart fibre at least?

* * *

_There are five things that I hold true in this universe._

**_One._**

I believe that I will never find anything that defines blue better than his eyes. Not the sky on the day that the bloody planes finally stop flying. Not the sea when the beaches were pure white and straight out of a postcard. Not even the blue of my flag. No. His eyes. His blue _blue _eyes. I can see them everywhere, like nature had found its muse and tried to paint everything with the same beautiful shade. But there were only cheap imitations, never the same, never worthy. The sky not wide enough to capture the endless blue. The sea not deep enough to express even a fraction of the depth of his gaze. Blue, a word never enough to say what his eyes were. As if the heavens had tried to come up with a cheap short cut way of describing his eyes and failed miserably. His eyes were not blue. Blue did not define his eyes. His eyes defined blue, gave it a meaning that was more than just a colour.

**_Two._**

We are all under the same sky. No matter the flag we fight under. No matter the circumstances. No matter even our names. The night sky is equally dark. The moon equally haunting. And it's something that no one can ever take away from us. We will _always_ share the same sky. When he's out in the trenches and the only thing he can see is the sky overhead and the stars - his only companions, I know, sometimes, he thinks of me. Because I think of him _all the time_. Perhaps the stars would play Horatio to our tragic Hamlet play and tell him the words I could never say, and may _never_ say. Maybe if I yelled loud enough, or wished hard enough. _Maybe_. Because the sky is our blank sheets of creased paper, the stars - our carefully chosen words and actions, to others just a random disarray, but to us, a beautiful constellation that was ours and _ours_ _alone._

**_Three._**

Time is relative. The few stolen moments we had, between assignments - moments of idyllic happiness, as the war raged on outside our fragile bubble of normalcy, they passed

so

fast.

Each silent morning, tangled in the cheap sheets that scratched our skin. Evenings spent by the fire, wrapped in afghans and each other, not sharing words yet telling each other the what we could never say. And the nights of desperate passion, clinging to each other as if it would stop our inevitable parting. The cracked clock lying on the table seemed to turn too fast, all of the mornings, evening, night, hour, minutes, seconds, too fast. _More time. Never enough time._ One more day. One more hour. Just one more minute. One more kiss. One more... _nothing_.

"Faster! Faster! Run!"

15 00

Heart pumping.

Blood racing.

Legs on automatic as I run across the field.

Shrapnel flying.

I hear someone scream.

Duck.

Fall down.

Stand up again.

Run.

Run.

Run.

Crash down on the grass as the bullets over my head.

His watch falls out.

_Oh wait, it's my watch now._ The watch he had shoved into my hands before he disappeared into the night. Engraved in the language that we shared, one of the_ few_ things that we shared. Dirt and grime coated it. But it never failed. Tick tick ticking, the sound that lulled me to sleep when I woke up blood racing in a paper thin bunk bed. I open it.

15 05

"Faster! Run! Run!" _Time please run faster. Faster. _

And it starts all over again.

**_Four._**

I believe that he will come home. I _know_ that he will. I know he will walk through the wooden door that we painted together and everything will be right again.

I will say everything I want to say to him. _No more hiding._ If one thing the war has taught me, it's that life is _too damn short._ Life is unfair. Life is hard. And life will kick you down, lend you a hand, just to knock your feet right out under you. But you will still reach for that hand. Because what else can you do? So there's no point hiding away from pain, because there is always the chance that, that hand might just lead you to something beautiful.

When I see him. I will tell him. I will tell him everything. I will tell him, that he is all I think about. That the other men have pictures of their girlfriends in their helmets and they sleep with their helmets over their faces. That I sleep under the stars because I know that somewhere, he is lying under the same stars, the same sky.

He will smile that stupid smile, open his arms and then it will be warm. The smell of old leather, the clinking of dog tags and he will laugh that rumbling laugh that I will feel along with his heartbeat _thump. thump. thump_. And I will think "He's home."

**_Five._**

I will fight. I will keep running. I will keep standing up even when my knees are so acquainted with the ground, that they forget what it means to keep myself upright. I will keep my firearm as my best friend. I will come back alive. I will fight for a world where we are free, where we don't have to fear. I will fight for the life that was so cruelly stolen from me when he received the letter, with that one word that mattered, "conscripted". When he donned that uniform - that I now shot on sight.

I will fight.

Because it's the only _damned_ thing I can do.

_Five things that I hold true._

_Five things that keep me running forward. _

_Five things that keep me breathing. _

_Five things. _

_One person._

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A/N Hey! Cacoethes here. So this is a Human AU, where the USA and UK are at war. I didn't really have a plot in mind, just writing things I thought of, and stitched them together into a (barely) coherent story. Evidently, I am not much of a plot person - I barely hit 1000 words I think? FF sort of messed up my formatting, you can try my LJ if you want to see the actual formatting. Tell me what you think! Thanks for reading! :D ADIOS!


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